"Yes. I can't help being worried by the inclination she displays. It frightens me in such a child." "Scott doesn't show it?" "No. He hates anything like that." "Do the servants thoroughly understand your orders?" "I'm a little troubled. I have given orders that no more brandied peaches are to be made or kept in the house. The child was perfectly truthful about it. She admitted filling her cologne bottle with the syrup and sipping it after she was supposed to be asleep." "Have you found out about the sherry she stole from the kitchen?" "Yes. She told me that for weeks she had kept it hidden and soaked a lump of sugar in it every night.... She is absolutely truthful, colonel. I've tried to make her understand the danger." "All right. Good-bye." Kathleen Severn hung up the receiver with a deep indrawn breath. From the nursery above came a joyous clamour and trampling and shouting. Suddenly she covered her face with her black-gloved hands. CHAPTER II IN TRUST The enfranchisement of the Seagrave twins proceeded too slowly to satisfy their increasing desire for personal liberty and their fast-growing impatience of restraint. Occasionally, a few carefully selected and assorted children were permitted to visit them in relays, and play in the nursery for limited periods without the personal supervision of Kathleen or the nurses; but no serious innovation was attempted, no radical step taken without authority from old Remsen Tappan, the trust officer of the great Half Moon Trust Company. There could be no arguing with Mr. Tappan. Shortly before Anthony Seagrave died he had written to his old friend Tappan: "If I live, I shall see to it that my grandchildren know nothing of the fortune awaiting them until they become of age--which will be after I am ended. Meanwhile, plain food and clothing, wholesome home seclusion from the promiscuity of modern child life, and an exhaustive education in every grace, fashion, and accomplishment of body and intellect is the training I propose for the development in them of the only thing in the world worth cultivating--unterrified individualism. "The ignorance which characterises the conduct of modern institutes of education reduces us all to one mindless level, reproducing _ad nauseam_ what is known as 'average citizens.' This nation is already crawling with them; art, religion, letters, government, business, human ideals remain embryonic because the 'average citizen' can conceive nothing higher, can comprehend nothing loftier even when the few who have escaped the deadly levelling grind of modern methods of education attempt to teach the masses to think for themselves. "That is bad enough in itself--but add to cut-and-dried pedagogy the outrageous liberty which modern pupils are permitted in school and college, and add to that the unheard-of luxury in which they live--and the result is stupidity and utter ruin.